All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (8 page)

There were pockets of the rapidly changing nation in which remaining single seemed to have been a plausible, if not easy or enjoyable, option for some women. At the turn of the nineteenth century, New Orleans saw an influx of refugees from Haiti, increasing the population of
gens de couleur libre
, or free blacks. Free women of color were permitted to inherit, own property, businesses, and slaves; it was not expected that they would marry. The comparative economic and sexual liberty experienced by these
libre
women provided them some incentive to steer clear of what free Maria Gentilly, who, after a husband squandered her estate, sued to recover it in the 1790s,
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called “the yoke of matrimony.”
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The late eighteenth century transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy precipitated a practical rethinking of male and female roles, at least in middle class households. Women's lives, long given over to the reproduction of human beings and the in-home production of food, clothes, and linens, suddenly had more space in them, thanks to the availability of commercially produced food and textiles. Improved medicine, decreased child mortality rates, longer life spans, and less farmland to work meant a need for fewer children.

The re-jiggering of roles in a young nation required new thinking about how women might be valued. The first third of the nineteenth century, with its mass religious revivals and a burgeoning women's magazine business, had new tools with which to communicate revised ideas about womanly virtue and value. From the pages of
Godey's Lady's Book
blared a new model of aspirational upper-class femininity and attitude about female purpose that historians now refer to as the Cult of Domesticity. The
wealthy, white American wife, relieved of her responsibilities for at-home production, became responsible for scrupulously maintaining a domicile that served as the feminized inverse of the newly bustling, masculine public space. The domestic sphere was re-imagined as a pious haven and moral refuge from the universe of business, industrial, and civic participation into which men were venturing.

Published in 1829,
The Young Lady's Book
asserted that “Whatever situation of life a woman is placed, from her cradle to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind, are required from her.”
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Everyday tasks were made more time-consuming and taxing, so as to better fill the days of women who might otherwise grow restive and attempt to leave the house. As
Godey's Lady's Book
helpfully informed readers, “There is more to be learned about pouring out tea and coffee than most young ladies are willing to believe.”
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And Catherine Beecher, a pioneer in education and strong proponent of education in the domestic arts, wrote in her 1841 book,
A Treatise on Domestic Economy,
that when a girl learned to do the laundry, she was “initiated into the arts and mysteries of the wash tub.”
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But as the eighteenth century wore on and the marriage rates began to drop for those women on the east coast left without the men who'd headed west, the increasing numbers of unmarried women had to be comfortably folded back into a social structure that relied on domesticity as its principle mode of female control; this need produced early nineteenth century rhetoric that historians now call the Cult of Single Blessedness. The ideas that undergirded Single Blessedness were that women unmarried by chance or by choice had their own acceptably submissive purpose. The “singly blessed” were presumed to be pious vessels whose commitment to service, undiluted by the needs of husbands or children, made them perfect servants of god, family, and community. Women without husbands were often expected to care for the sick and destitute within their communities, and were expected to care for aging parents as married siblings headed off to tend new families.

Calling single women a “corps de reserve,” nineteenth-century preacher George Burnap conveyed the dismal logic of Single Blessedness in his
Lectures on the Sphere and Duties of Woman and Other Subjects
.
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Just “as
no wise general brings all his forces into the field at once, but keeps back a part to supply deficiencies,” Burnap wrote, “so are unmarried women stationed . . . to take the places of those who . . . refuse to do their duty.” While couples were out enjoying life's pleasures, he noted, single ladies were “toiling over those household duties which the gay and thoughtless have forgotten, or are watching by the bed side of pain and death.”
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Wheee!

Even the most dastardly efforts to redirect nondomestic ambitions into service could not bottle up all of the energies of the nineteenth century's women, especially those who, absent husbands and children to tend to, were swiftly expanding the scope of their professional and intellectual ambitions. Maria Mitchell, a female astronomer from Massachusetts, predicted of woman: “once emancipate her from the ‘stitch, stitch, stitch,' and she would have time for studies which would engross as the needle never can.”
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Louisa May Alcott, perhaps the century's best known literary agitator against the confinements of matrimony and a strenuous proponent of independent life for women, agreed. The daughter of a transcendentalist reformer and a social worker, Alcott had decided as a child that she had no wish to marry, a conviction that remained firm throughout her adulthood. In 1868, Alcott described “all the busy, useful independent spinsters” she knew, and argued both that “liberty is a better husband than love to many of us” and that “the loss of liberty, happiness, and self-respect is poorly repaid by the barren honor of being called ‘Mrs.' instead of ‘Miss.' ”
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Alcott's determination to make herself economically independent stemmed perhaps from her family's economic need. Alcott worked as a teacher, nurse, seamstress, governess, writer, maid, and magazine editor to help support her parents and siblings. Alcott's path was an exceptional one; she managed to help provide for her family, but then went further, establishing
herself
as economically autonomous and experiencing contemporary renown as the author of
Little Women
,
Little Men
, and dozens of other stories and books. Yet for for the vast majority of her contemporaries, creative vocations were barely remunerated hobbies, bearing little resemblance to what we think of today as “careers.” Even for the most ambitious, talented, and successful women, there was scant chance of
attaining anything comparable to the status accorded male peers, and little possibility of earning a stable living.

Teaching didn't offer much job security and was poorly paid, but it was a growing field. Industrialization had meant that many more children no longer needed to work fields and could thus attend school and stay longer. Literacy rates in the United States had increased dramatically between the late 1700s and mid-1800s and the expansion of primary and secondary schools created a need for educators. Women, already comfortably regarded as nurturers to children, could fill the void. Journalist Dana Goldstein writes that, in 1800, 90 percent of American school teachers were men. By 1900, three-quarters of them were women, more than half of them single, since a set of policies known as “marriage bars,” which allowed school districts to fire married women or deny them tenure, made it largely impossible for women to continue teaching after they were married in many states.
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As Goldstein points out, education pioneers including Horace Mann and the never-married Catharine Beecher “explicitly conceived of teaching as a job for spinsters,” an occupation that could “ease the stigma of being unwed”
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and permit unmarried women to nurture young children and thus fulfill their domestic calling, even without offspring of their own.

The outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 soon drew women into another profession, nursing. The industrial revolution also meant the proliferation of mills, many of which—like the textile-producing town of Lowell, Massachusetts—were staffed almost exclusively by young, unmarried women. Domestic service was the last choice of many and, therefore, often the job left to the poorest, often women of color.

In these contexts, and in others, including the religious revivals of the mid-nineteenth century, which encouraged a moral conscientiousness and concern with the improvement and uplift of society, women were encountering each other outside of the domestic sphere.

As the nation grew, the question of whether new territories would be slave or free was forcing a crisis. Women, meeting each other in schools and factories, where many of them were likely to be young and single, were participating in that conversation and coalescing around a handful of social movements that would alter the future of the nation.

In a 1840 letter to the
The Lowell Offering
, the publication of the Massachusetts mill town that employed thousands of young, single women and would become one of the birth places of the later labor movement, a correspondent named Betsey claiming to be “one of that unlucky, derided, and almost despised set of females, called spinsters, single sisters, lay-nuns . . . but who are more usually known by the appellation of Old Maids” argued that it was “a part of [God's] wise design that there should be
Old Maids
,” in part because “they are the founders and pillars of anti-slavery, moral reform, and all sorts of religious and charitable societies.”
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Here was the idea of service and moral uplift brought into disruptive relief: What if women, in service to greater and moral good, did not submit themselves to a larger power structure, but instead organized to overturn it?

Frederick Douglass would write in 1881, “When the true history of the antislavery cause shall be written, woman will occupy a large space in its pages; for the cause of the slave has been peculiarly woman's cause.”
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And many of the women who had time and ability to devote themselves to the cause of emancipation were women without husbands or families, at least during the time of their activism. These women included abolitionists Susan. B. Anthony and Sarah Grimké, neither of whom would ever marry, but also Sarah's sister Angelina, who had already drawn public attention for fiery antislavery speeches before she married a fellow abolitionist at age thirty-three.

Abolitionist thinking naturally overlapped women's rights advocacy. Antislavery reformers including Anthony and the Grimkés, as well as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Maria Stewart, and Lydia Maria Child, fought first for abolition, but soon broadened their attentions to address the persistent legal, social, and civil subjugation of women. They worked alongside men, including William Lloyd Garrison, who spoke up in defense of female abolitionists not permitted to enter the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, and Frederick Douglass, one of the thirty-two men to sign 1848's Declaration of Sentiments, the document drawn up in Seneca Falls, New
York, which laid out one of the early blueprints for the emancipation of women.

Not all the women in these movements were single. But the perceived overlap between singlehood and the antislavery movement was strong enough that some early abolitionist women were accused of wanting to free slaves so that they might marry black men.
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And many reformers
were
single, or at least excruciatingly aware of the gender limitations of the marriage model. When abolitionist and suffragist Lucy Stone married Henry Blackwell in 1855, the couple asked their minister to distribute a statement protesting marriage's inequities. It read, in part: “While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife . . . this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage, as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority.” Stone kept her last name, and generations of women who have done the same have been referred to as “Lucy Stoners.”

An awareness of potentially injurious dynamics of marriage also undergirded the burgeoning movement to make alcohol illegal. Led by both single activists, notably Frances Willard, and married women, the temperance movement aimed to cut down on the drunken indolence (at best) and violence (at worst) of husbands by prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcohol. There may be no greater testament to the suffocating power of marital expectation than the fact that, for a time, the
banning of booze
seemed a more practical recourse against spousal abuse than the reform of marriage law or redress of inequities within the home.

About three million men left home to fight in The Civil War; more than 600,000 of them died, on the battlefields and of disease, many tended to by women who joined the war effort on both sides by working as nurses. The experience of single life and widowhood became far more common for America's women, both during the war and in the years that followed.

In 1865, the governor of Massachusetts proposed the transport of
some of the 38,000 “excess” women in his state to Oregon and California, where women were in short supply. The state legislature demurred, revealing how swiftly society had come to rely on the labors of unmarried women: Should all the damsels of New England be deported, the legislature argued, “the whirring music of millions of spindles would be silent as a sepulchre, while the mistresses of more than 100,000 dwellings would be in consternation from the catastrophe of such a withdrawal of one, two, or three or more domestics from their premises.”
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